Colm O'Regan: Where would we be without summer camps?

Summer camps do the state some service. Pic: iStock

Fair play to the summer camps. I know there’s a bit of panic with accessing one. There’s not enough for everyone. They’re probably better for smaller children etc etc.

But still, for what’s there, just like grandparents and carers and a host of other professions and people who are the thin line between some sort of arrangement and complete chaos, the camp people should get a few plaudits. 

The people who come to the rescue during the long summer holidays.

I love the long summer holidays of course but part of me wonders if the whole concept of summer needs to be challenged. 

We need some flexibility. It looks like July is now our summer monsoon.

They might as well be in school so and watch the rain while doing tin whistle, the liom leat leis lei leo and highest common factor and instead give them May off so we can all get sneaky deals on holidays before the rest of Europe joins in.

‘There were no camps in my day, young ’uns’, I say making a pointless comparison between two different planets. 

But I grew up on a farm. My home was a camp. I could be let out for the day. I knew my boundaries. What farmer’s son isn’t aware of ditches? 

I know I’m at the age where I would advocate for children to be sent to farms to work during the summer to knock the corners off them but there aren’t many jobs for unskilled minors on farms anymore. And the ones they could do, they probably wouldn’t get insurance.

So I repeat, fair play to the camp people. We can wring our hands about the old days.

Of course, in an ideal world there should be no camps.

A gaggle of children should be hunted out the door and minded by someone about 18 months older than them as they roam the streets stealing apples from trees and infuriating the local garda on his beat with their japes.

And thanks to the design of the entire country to suit cars, and now silent ones, you wouldn’t get a wink of sleep sending them out on their bikes like the Famous Five.

Last year we sent them to Forest School. Great fun.

They just mucked about in the woods of a park with a few people who taught them how to make fires and cook on a stove.

One day had to be cancelled because of an orange weather warning for rain. Orange? In July? The only orange warning should be on July 12.

And irony of ironies, in one of the dry days of Forest School some windbag was moaning at the camp organiser about the danger of teaching children about campfires with earth dripping around them.

A classic case of “why can’t children do what we did?” followed by “hey, children, stop doing what we did!”

Some camps are dearer than others, but some of the best are reasonably priced.

There are teenagers in GAA camps and local legends in youth club camps like our one.

They’re certainly not coining it for some offshore multinational. Our two are having a better time than preoccupied us can give them. 

And of course, the other ideal scenario is for us to take the whole summer off and take them Swiss Family Robinsoning somewhere ourselves.

I’d love to just take them playing with sticks and digging holes in mud. 

I would much rather mind them than work or do my VAT but that has been a surprisingly weak argument with Revenue in the past.

So to the camp people, thanks, you are doing the state some service.